Jail inspection turns up five minor violations
Groveton News - November 2007

GROVETON – Five minor deficiencies found in the Trinity County Jail during a state inspection last week will all be corrected by the end of this week, according to Sheriff Steven Jones.

Jones said the state inspector visited the jail on Wednesday, Nov. 7, and found that the facility failed to meet state standards in five areas.

On Tuesday, Jones said that four of the five problems identified in the inspection have been corrected and the fifth would be fixed by the end of this week.

“The problems were very minor and easy to correct,” Jones said. “I’ll have to write a letter to the jail commission once they are all taken care of and ask for them to come back and take another look.”

Problems that have already been solved included the lack of an inspection certification on the jail’s smoke detectors; the failure to “classify” all of the county’s prisoners; the failure to reclassify prisoners every 30 to 60 days; and the failure to conduct quarterly training on the jail’s air pack units used by jail personnel during a fire.

“Two of the problems were really just one – the classification of prisons. We are required to classify all of our prisoners as minimum, medium or maximum security. We’ve been doing that for the prisoners we keep here but we have not being doing that for the ones we send out-of-county. We’ve been leaving the classification of those prisoners to the jails where they are housed.” Jones said the inspector said state regulations require him to classify all county prisoners, regardless of where they are being held.

Because the Trinity County Jail is only certified to hold seven long-term inmates, most of the county’s prisoners are housed under contract with jails in other counties.

Jones noted that because they have not been classifying inmates sent out of county, they also had not been re-classifying them every 30 to 60 days.

“We changed that immediately and every county prisoner has been classified,” he said.

The one problem that has not yet been corrected was the failure to list the department’s radio dispatchers in their dual role as jailors.

“I have to have all of the dispatchers obtain a physical exam and as soon as that is completed, they will be listed (as jailor-dispatchers),” Jones said.